Microsoft Surface

Football season is here and Microsoft wants to be a big part of it, redefining the way sports fans experience the game. When Microsoft unveiled its next-gen gaming console, it also announced a partnership with NFL to bring a new football experience in your living room. Now we're getting more information about new features that will be hitting not only the Xbox One but the Surface tablet as well.

The temporary price cut that Microsoft made to its Surface tablets earlier this month will be permanent, it has been revealed, leaving both the Surface Pro and the Surface RT varieties of the tablets -- as well as the Touch Cover -- a fair bit cheaper. The price change isn't instantaneous, however, with the company saying it will be altering the prices in a phased approach.

The Surface RT may not have lived up to every expectation Microsoft had, but it doesn't look like that is going to stop them from returning with a follow-up model. Despite nothing official coming from Microsoft just yet, there is already talk of that follow-up device. That talk has come by way of NVIDIA's CEO who recently told CNET they are "working really hard on it."

Microsoft revealed its fiscal Q4 2013 financial earnings today, and the company raked in a healthy revenue, for which they even got to keep a nearly a quarter of for themselves, but it wasn't all roses, however. Microsoft's Surface RT took a huge hit, and the company lost $900 million just on the device itself due to "inventory adjustments."

After yesterday's discount of the Surface RT becoming official in the US, Microsoft is expanding the price cut globally to various other countries, including the UK and Australia. Microsoft has updated its UK and Australian stores with updated prices for the older Windows tablet to reflect the lower price tag.

Microsoft's Surface team has taken on development of the company's upcoming smartwatch, it's reported, with the wrist-worn gadget supposedly running a modified version of Windows 8. The Surface smartwatch is being built on an original design by the Xbox team, The Verge's sources claim, which had been tinkering with a "Joule" heart-rate monitor prototype for the Xbox 360.

We heard a few days ago that retailers were beginning to discount Microsoft's Surface RT tablet, but it wasn't clear if this was a retailer-focused sale, or if Microsoft was beginning to discount its lower-end tablet line altogether. However, Microsoft officially lowered the price of the Surface RT to a mere $349 in Microsoft Stores.

First revealed late last month in Japan, the 256GB version of Microsoft's Surface Pro appears to be going on sale in the US, although we haven't heard any word from Microsoft on the matter. A 256GB variant has showed up on CDW's website, which is one of Microsoft's authorized retailers, so we at least know it's legitimate from what we can see.

Students across the country will soon be using a cleaned up version of Microsoft's search engine ecosystem Bing, devoid (or so they hope) of content they're not especially fond of sending out to under-age citizens of the USA. Microsoft spoke up this week at the International Society for Technology for Education meeting in San Antonio, Texas, and dubbed the program "Bing for Schools."

Microsoft is set to reveal new versions of the Surface RT tablet, using Qualcomm Snapdragon processors alongside existing NVIDIA Tegra chips, sources claim, with the goal of adding integrated LTE support. Although NVIDIA will supply processors "for some versions" insiders told Bloomberg, Qualcomm's Snapdragon would feature in other models, as Microsoft attempts to make its homegrown slate more directly competitive with the iPad.

Microsoft has confirmed that Windows RT tablets will get a full copy of Outlook 2013 RT as of the Windows 8.1 update, helping open a few more enterprise doors for slates like Surface. The app, not currently available for "Windows-on-ARM", has been a frequently requested one, Microsoft conceded, and the company hopes will help shift Windows RT out of the grey area between business and personal use.

Yesterday when Microsoft announced the Xbox One, they also announced a partnership with the NFL that would see an immersive NFL experience come to the new console, as well as some Microsoft technology coming to sidelines next season. However, during the keynote, the company didn't specify what exactly would be coming to sidelines, but now we that Surface tablets will hitting the NFL in a big way.